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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

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Reginald Dwayne Betts is the author of Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, 2015) and Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010), which won the 2010 Beatrice Hawley Award. He is the recipient of a 2019 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Betts was an Emerson Fellow at New America, and is a PhD candidate at Yale Law School. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Shahid Reads His Own Palm

I come from the cracked hands of men who used
the smoldering ends of blunts to blow shotguns,
men who arranged their lives around the mystery
of the moon breaking a street corner in half.
I come from "Swann Road" written in a child's
slanted block letters across a playground fence,
the orange globe with black stripes in Bishop's left
hand, untethered and rolling to the sideline,
a crowd openmouthed, waiting to see the end
of the sweetest crossover in a Virginia state pen.
I come from Friday night's humid and musty air,
Junk Yard Band cranking in a stolen Bonneville,
a tilted bottle of Wild Irish Rose against my lips
and King Hedley's secret written in the lines of my palm.
I come from beneath a cloud of white smoke, a lit pipe
and the way glass heats rocks into a piece of heaven,
from the weight of nothing in my palm,
a bullet in an unfired snub-nosed revolver.
And every day the small muscles in my finger threaten to pull
a trigger, slight and curved like my woman's eyelashes.

Reginald Dwayne Betts

Reginald Dwayne Betts is the author of Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, 2015) and Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010), which won the 2010 Beatrice Hawley Award. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

by this poet

after George Jackson
Because something else must belong to him,
More than these chains, these cuffs, these cells—
Something more than Hard Rock’s hurt,
More than remembrances of where men
Go mad with craving—corpuscle, epidermis,
Flesh, men buried in the whale of it, all of it,
Because the

A woman tattoos Malik’s name aboveher breast & talks about the conspiracyto destroy blacks. This is all a fancy wayto say that someone kirked out, emptiedfive or six or seven shots into a still warm body.No indictment follows Malik’s death,follows smoke running from a fired

The magazine on my lap talksabout milk. Tells me that in America,every farmer lost money onevery cow, every day of every monthof the year. Imagine that? To wakeup and know you’re digging yourselfdeeper into a hole you can’t seeout of, even as your hands are wetwith

related poems

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.
Nor is it palm and knuckles,
not ligaments or the fat's yellow pillow,
not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.
A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines
with their infinite dramas,
nor what it has written,
not on the page,
not on the

No palms dolled up the tedium, no breathing wind.
No problem was the buzzword then, their way to go.
In truth, my case was black as sin, a thing to hide,
In that they feigned to find me sane, so not to know.
Someone brought in a medium. Anathema!
Some clown sewed up my eyes, he said it

When I fall asleep
my hands leave me.
They pick up pens
and draw creatures
with five feathers
on each wing.
The creatures multiply.
They say: "We are large
like your father's
hands."
They say: "We have
your mother's
knuckles."
I speak to them:
"If you are hands,